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We once roamed the vast forums of Corona Coming Attractions. Some of us had been around from The Before Times, in the Days of Excelsior, while others of us had only recently begun our trek. When our home became filled with much evil, including the villainous Cannot-Post-in-This-Browser and the dreaded Cannot-Log-In, we flounced away most huffily to this new home away from home. We follow the flag of Jubboiter and talk about movies, life, the universe, and everything, often in a most vulgar fashion. All are welcome here, so long as they do not take offense to our particular idiom.

It reminds me of the Street Fighter Flash Collab from Newgrounds, but I like the humor in the Mortal Kombat one a lot better. Plus, the fact that it uses the actual game sprites makes it a lot more charming.

I originally saw the above video in a Facebook embed and tried to track down the original. I think the above may be the original.

Watching this kid is infuriating. It's infuriating, in part, because the accent is so very close to a southern Appalachian accent. She's a vocal dead ringer for my stepbrother's ex-wife.

I was pretty sure this was filmed in Alabama or a neighboring state when I saw it on Facebook. I'm still not sure where the video was filmed or where the kid is from (like a lot of teens in the Deep South, this kid already has a lifelong smoker's voice), but another video on the same YouTube user's site gives some potential clues. It features two other kids playing an original composition. The video's description claims that one of those kids is from Martin, Tennessee and that the other is from Southaven, Mississippi.

I suspect that this is at least in part a problem of nomenclature (the other part is the girl just being dense). There seems to be a disconnect in her mind between "a quarter," "1/4," and "one fourth." Of course, the person asking the question doesn't use this as a pedagogical moment, but instead just keeps on humiliating the girl by asking the same question over and over again. That's what infuriated me, but then again, I have a tendency to play the didact, which annoys my wife.

There are no winners on either side of the camera in that first video. I kinda like the tune in the second. I meant to add a line about the culture of humiliation in the South. I added the "in part" to set this up, but I forgot to go back after I got over-involved with trying to track the YouTuber's region down.

I feel like more mocking gets done than teaching in the Deep South. Maybe that's for the best, since even the licensed teachers down there often seem ill-equipped to teach and often teach more wrong than right. (I'm generalizing. There are some good teachers down there, just as there are good teachers most places.) People also love to "get one over" on another person down there, which I don't suppose is exclusive to the South, but I do feel like there's something almost violent about the fervor with which Deep Southerners revel in humiliating a person. (See, for example, this video of an Alabama fan tea-bagging a passed-out LSU fan in a Bourbon Street fast food joint. I'm pretty sure I shared it in the past.)

There's also, famously, a common-sense-trumps-book-learning culture in the Deep South, and you see a lot of what I call "The Fool Prevails" humor. (I bet TV Tropes has a better name for it.) Sometimes, this is done in a way that's (almost) charming, as with this Jerry Clower sketch. Other times, it just makes me want to hurt myself, as with this clip from Ma and Pa Kettle on the Farm. (The Kettle one is a variation on an Abbott and Costello routine which was itself probably a variation on some Vaudeville routine. I'm pretty sure I've shared the Clower and Kettle in the past, too.)

Annoyingly, a lot of the southerners who know the Kettle clip take the wrong thing from it. They see a bumpkin revealing himself to be the cleverer person and/or exposing the inadequacy of math instruction. (You'll also see some "LOL Common Core" comments from dismissive anti-Common Core types.) They don't see what they should see, which is arrogant idiocy shooting itself in the foot. (You'll note that, to produce the first result, Pa Kettle doesn't even adhere to his own fucked system on the when dividing the remainder. Granted, the other guy should have spoken up and stopped him in the middle of not adhering to his system.)

I've gotten pretty far afield of what I was saying at the start of the post. I guess I mostly covered it already. I just wanted to say that it was typical of people in the Deep South to choose humiliation over instruction. (The tangent about book learning being frowned upon isn't really meant to tie back to the measuring cup video, since the relationship of 1/4 and a quarter would conceivably be something one could discover in books. The people mocking the kid clearly see it as common knowledge for someone her age, though, and it should be. It's the Deep South, though, so it's unfortunately probably not. I guess if I wanted to try to tie it back, I might say something about how the kid, herself, may not know this simple thing because she has embraced the South's culture of willful ignorance. [Lot of different cultures down south. They really only want you to have a vote if you belong to a specific one, unfortunately.]) I was also going to say I was reminded of the (staged) video series featuring the British couple arguing, an example of which can be seen below:

In this case, too, I find myself annoyed with the person behind the camera. They're in cahoots and going for humor, of course, and the guy arguably tries to explain things to a certain extent, so it's not as bad as the measuring cup video. The measuring cup video turns out to be a video shot by assholes mocking a dumb person (or, maybe, a person ignorant of a specific bit of knowledge common to many) for being dumb.